...In Which Camelids Explain It All To You... The Llama and the Paca True unite their cute furry spitting camelid forces to conquer evil and churn out blog stuff more frequently. Wonder Camelids unite! Shape of a pack animal! Form of wool-bearing, scarf-producing cuddly thing!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Days like this (paca)

What a week so far.

The basic fact is that I am woefully behind in my one major class - eyetracking. We only have one task for this class, and that's to present the findings of our pilot experiment on May 10th. Have I started my data analysis yet? No. Have I run my subjects yet? No. Do I have my experiment up and running in the software yet? No. Do I have all my stimuli created yet? No.

But, paca, this is your major class, so you've been working on it frantically, right?

No. Because on May 1, I'm supposed to get proofs of the journal articles all to the web mistress for conversion for publication on May 1. So I stayed in my office Sunday, Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday night copy editing and copy editing. In the last four days I've edited about 50,000 words of academic prose. For perspective, 50,000 words is considered a short novel. About another 25,000 are still waiting my attention.

But finally as of 12:30 AM tonight, I've caught up enough in the journal so that I can switch finally back to the experiment.

I'm in one of those states where I really don't know how I'm going to get everything done, so you just keep working as much as you can each day, and then hopefully it all comes out.

In such a mood, I was riding my bike home tonight at 1:00 AM and right as I hit the bridge into Waikiki, the bottom falls out and I get so soaked my clothes weigh more than me. That set of clothes is now hanging out on various chairs and such.

But this isn't just a rant about being over-worked, as some good things are happening as well.

1) I got my working paper back from a reader and all she had were a few typos. Other than spewing praise, that's about as good as it gets. If the other reader also passes it, then that major program requirement is almost done.

2)I turned in late last week a possible dissertation plan to a prof and we are trying to schedule a meeting to see if it's a good topic.

3) Today, I asked the ICS prof I've been hanging out with if she'd still be willing to be an outside member on my committee, and she said yes. Moreover, I happened to mention that my big problem right now is that I don't have a committee chair and what my possible topic was, and she gets all excited and insisted I go find out if someone in another department can be a chair for me, because she'd love to be my adviser since my topic is so amazing. This is the prof where I wrote last September about how she'd put the smackdown on me.

4) At 11:30 tomorrow, ok today, I meet with another prof to find out about teaching or assisting her in teaching a phonetics class. My ideal fall semester is that I teach, edit, and work on my dissertation and comprehensive exams. oh, and maybe Korean. We'll see.

In short, if things go well, in three weeks I could either finally have a chair, a dissertation topic, a reading list for comps, a new issue of my journal, a teaching job for the fall, and a nice little pilot experiment under my belt. That's freaking forward motion.

Or... I could have no chair, no idea yet on the dissertation, a late publication of the journal, no teaching job, and an Incomplete in the class for not getting the experiment done.